Sweaty Guys Who Smell Like Salmon: Dakota Fanning vs Alaskan Men in The Sun Never Sets

THE SUN NEVER SETS

(Joe Swanberg, USA, 2026, 104 mins) 

The Sun Never Sets isn't really about Alaska, but Joe Swanberg set his latest feature, his first in six years, in my home state. 

I'm not sure why, because it isn't the easiest place to shoot a feature, independent or otherwise. The summer days are so long, the winter days are so short--and cold and icy--and everything is more expensive. 

A film's budget will only balloon the more a director flies in actors, crew members, and equipment. I'm sure he used as many local resources as  possible, but those are limited, so I would imagine it was still a challenge. Then again, maybe that's just what he needed to shake up his routine.    

For these and other reasons, most films and TV shows set in Alaska, like Northern Exposure or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, are filmed elsewhere, usually Canada or Washington, and I can always tell, since I grew up there. 

Right: David Strathairn as a sweaty guy who probably smells like salmon in John Sayles' Limbo

Maybe most people can't tell, but it's always bothered me, so John Sayles' Limbo, a low-key 1999 thriller, and Sean Penn's 2007 Jon Krakauer adaptation Into the Wild felt like outliers. Granted, I wasn't completely surprised that Sayles and Penn would film on location, but Swanberg, the one-time Chicago King of Mumblecore? No, I did not see that coming. 

I've long had a fraught relationship with the director’s work. Granted, I haven't seen all 20 features, plus streaming projects, but I've seen enough. Drinking Buddies (2013), however, marked a shift from the solipsistic, navel-gazey films that had come before. 

In it, Olivia Wilde and Swanberg muse Jake Johnson play straight people who forge a Platonic friendship, and that's the gist of it. It isn't as common as you might think, since most on-screen friendships comprise women with women and men with men, not counting the gay best friend, since there's no possibility of romance–unless one of the straight people realizes they aren't so straight after all. The Sun Never Sets is a return to the loose-limbed relationship dramas with which Swanberg made his name, albeit on a slightly bigger scale and with a more experienced director at the helm. 

Dakota Fanning, most recently of Netflix's Ripley, plays Wendy, a 31-year-old heavy-machine operator whose married friends are starting to have kids. She can't relate, because it isn't where she's at, at least not yet. (Swanberg had two kids with filmmaker Kris Rey, from whom he is now divorced.) 

Left: a more glammed-up Dakota Fanning in Ripley with Johnny Flynn

Wendy isn't single, though. For the past two years, she's been seeing Jack (Johnson, recently of Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), a middle-aged hedge fund manager and part-time girls basketball coach with two kids of his own. His ex-wife (Anna Konkle) has moved on to a new partner (played by Swanberg) and new kid, but the director avoids soap operatics, since Jack doesn't resent his ex and the kids don't resent his girlfriend.

Wendy believes she's ready to settle down with a guy who doesn't want to remarry or have more kids, but Jack is skeptical, since she has interests, like camping and houseboats, that don't jibe with his. He's not wrong that she isn't ready, but his demand that they separate for six months, so that she can explore life as an unencumbered individual--a sort of Rumspringa for non-Amish adults--feels controlling, since he doesn't give her a choice, though he swears he'll be waiting for her if she decides to return. 

If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't, because one-sided ultimatums don't bode well for lasting relationships, not least when her friends take his side. She also has the option of not seeing anyone and biding her time for six months, but she reenters the dating pool instead, both awkwardly and reluctantly.

Then one night, she runs into Chuck (Gotham's Cory Michael Smith), an old flame who has returned to town as a pilot for an air taxi company, and their chemistry is instant, even after three years apart (though Fanning and Johnson have an amiable rapport, there's more sexual heat between her and Smith). Jack didn't think she would hook up with another guy so soon, but she does, and he doesn't take it well. I can see why she might want to have fun while they're on a break, but Chuck immediately starts talking marriage, and she doesn't seem to find that premature. 

Fanning is very good, and this is mostly her film, as much as Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles was mostly sister Elle's show, but Swanberg treats her like a yo-yo. That's the point, but as the men increase the pressure, and she bounces between the two, both look like bad bets. 

Alaska may offer its share of "sweaty guys who smell like salmon," but that's no reason to settle. The way Jack tells her he loves her over and over again comes to feel aggressive, especially since she rarely says she loves him back. I don't doubt that she does, but not quite as passionately. 

Tired of being alone, Jack takes up with Sara (Karley Sciortino from Swanberg's Netflix series Easy and co-writer of Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex), and the two couples even run into each other at her favorite watering hole for trivia night, but Swanberg doesn't play any of this for laughs, despite the way some viewers--though not me--have characterized the film as a rom-com. That tense evening, which leads to a series of shouting and laughing matches, serves as a catalyst, but not necessarily in the way I would have expected. I was certain the film would end in one very particular way, but it doesn't, and that's to Swanberg's credit, since these characters all have some work to do.

Though reviews have been all over the map, I liked the film more than not, and would recommend Richard Brody's unusual review, in which he explains how what might play like weaknesses in another film become strengths in this one. The Sun Never Sets can be repetitive, some actors handle the improvised dialogue better than others, and there's more mid-tempo singer-songwriter material on the soundtrack than any one film can use, some performed by Joe's brother James. None of it is bad, necessarily, and I'm always happy to hear former Seattleities La Luz, but it lends the film an adult contemporary sheen that works against the prickliness of the scenario.

I could also nitpick Swanberg's representation of Anchorage, nicely shot in 35mm by Eon Mora, except he's not far off the mark. Not everyone works as a pilot or a fisherman; there are lawyers and accountants, too, but that's never been Swanberg's milieu, so it makes sense that he would focus on less-corporate types, some of whom also paint or, like Wendy, work with wood. And it was fun to spot familiar locations, like Chilkoot Charlie's, Kaladi Brothers Coffee, and the Sunshine Plaza (above), where my mom worked as a pre-sentence reporter for the Alaska State Department of Corrections.  

I wouldn't want to overpraise The Sun Never Sets, but it deserves better than it's gotten, and may well serve as the most accurate cinematic depiction of my hometown to date. I mean, the sky really is pearlescent white, not blue or grey, more often than not. It's the damnest thing, and probably has a lot to do with Cook Inlet, the body of water bordering the city, but when you see a film set in and around Anchorage featuring the bluest of blue skies, you can bet it was probably shot somewhere else.

The Sun Never Sets only played in Seattle on Sept 10, but it's playing IFC Center in New York through Sept 17. It's also playing Anchorage's Cinemark Century and Beartooth Theatre Pub, among other venues. Images: The Independent Film Company via Mark Reviews Movies (Dakota Fanning), Far Out Magazine (Fanning and Cory Michael Smith), 1A (Fanning and Jake Johnson), and the IMDb (David Strathairn and Fanning and Flynn).

Seattle Sound Flashback: Lynn Shelton's Conversations with Her 13-Year-Old Self

Here is a revived version of a 2006 Seattle Sound piece about Lynn Shelton's directorial debut and a sidebar about the independent company that produced it. I'm not certain when the publication came to an end, but I contributed from 2006-2007, during which time it morphed into Sound. City Arts, also now expired, would rise from the ashes.

LYNN SHELTON AND LAURA VEIRS:

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY 13-YEAR-OLD SELF

For her first full-length feature, Lynn Shelton, who traded acting for directing several years ago, decided to revisit a time in her life that may be long gone, but still feels as fresh as last night's dream. 

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at 2006's Slamdance Film Festival, We Go Way Back is the captivating result. Dreams, in fact, play a big part in the story, as Kate (Cornish grad Amber Hubert), a fixture on the fringe circuit, finds her dream-life intruding upon her real life upon turning 23. 

Offered the lead in Ibsen's proto-feminist drama Hedda Gabler, the Ballard actress should be thrilled, but instead she keeps re-reading letters she wrote to herself at 13. Meanwhile, the play's production grows increasingly convoluted, to the point where Kate must speak her lines in Norwegian, while everyone else gets to speak in English. Then there are all the not-great men she can't resist. Why? What happened to her self-confidence? 

Kate dreams about the more self-assured young woman she used to be until that person--13-year-old Kate (Garfield student Maggie Brown)--comes to life. As Shelton explains in her director's statement, "At 13, I possessed a clarity of vision and a degree of self-confidence that I marvel at today."

Aside from the Northwest talent on both sides of the camera, We Go Way Back takes place in Seattle and the Key Peninsula and features an all-local soundtrack. Music supervisor Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) helped Shelton round up a stellar line-up of artists, including the Decemberists and the Lights [Nelson would star in Shelton's followup, My Effortless Brilliance]. 

Local singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, however, provides the bulk of the score, and her evocative songs are a perfect fit for Shelton's expressive visuals. 

As Veirs recollects, "Once I met her, I instantly connected with her and wanted to get involved. She showed me some of her previous short films, and I liked those a lot, so I dove right into the project."

Aside from a cover of 1930s standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," the rest of the material stems from Veirs' recordings Carbon Glacier and Year of Meteors. When we met to discuss the movie, Shelton enthused, "It's amazing. It just works so beautifully as soundtrack." 

The experience of working together was so fulfilling that she followed up by shooting a video for "Magnetized," with plans to include it as a DVD extra.

A longtime Seattle resident, Shelton teaches at The Art Institute and expects to start shooting her second feature next summer. Veirs, meanwhile, looks forward to more movie composing. She acknowledges, "It's not something I'd done prior to working with Lynn." Now it's one of her main objectives.

As for her fall plans: "My band the Tortured Souls and I are touring the West Coast, and then we're making our fifth record together." [The result was 2007's Saltbreakers.] Sadly for Seattleites, she intends to relocate to Portland afterward, but don't count out further collaborations between these two talented Northwesterners. 

We Go Way Back opens at Seattle’s Varsity Theatre on September 15.

THE PRODUCERS: FILM PRODUCTION IN SEATTLE

We Go Way Back was produced by Seattle studio The Film Company. Founded in 2004 by filmmaker Gregg Lachow (The Seven Mysteries of Life), it's not to be confused with the Capitol Hill cinematheque Northwest Film Forum, which produced and entered the world of distribution with Robinson Devor's critically acclaimed Police Beat. The two non-profits are separate entities, although a pre-Film Company Lachow was recipient of the NWFF's first "Start-to-Finish" grant for his 1999 feature Money Buys Happiness.   

As Lachow explains, "[The Film Company] greenlights artists, not projects. We don't read scripts or hear pitches." So far, they have produced one short and four features. (NYC's Cyan Pictures is distributing We Go Way Back.) 

Their next feature release is Canadian director Guy Maddin's Seattle-filmed, silent effort Brand Upon the Brain!, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall. Then they'll begin working on The Part I Love the Best, to be directed by Lachow's wife, actress Megan Murphy.   

Michael Seiwerath is NWFF's executive director, a post he took over from cofounder Jamie Hook in 2001. (Hook founded the organization with Deborah Girdwood in 1995.) 

According to Seiwerath, "The NWFF has aided in the production of more than 500 films. Police Beat is the fifth Start-to-Finish feature film we have actively produced or co-produced, and we are in development on the sixth, [David Russo's] #2. We are looking to start a national art house film network, made of the cinematheques in North America." They are also working on a DVD release for Police Beat.    

Endnote: I interviewed Lynn Shelton in person at Caffe Vita; Laura Veirs, Gregg Lachow, and Michael Seiwerath by email. We Go Way Back is available to stream on most every digital platform thanks to Factory 25. In case you're wondering what Maggie Brown has been up to, Paul Siple, who went to school with her at Garfield, provides the very cool answer.  

Images: Rotten Tomatoes (Maggie Brown), MUBI (Amber Hubert), Mastering Modernity (a nightmarish Hedda Gabler), Always on the Run (Veirs in/around 2006), and The Criterion Collection (Brand Upon the Brain!).

My Need to Possess You Has Consumed My Soul: On Eckhart Schmidt’s 1982 Der Fan

 DER FAN / The Fan (aka Trance)

(Eckhart Schmidt, Germany, 1982, 92 minutes) 

My need to possess you has consumed my soul 

My life is trembling, I have no control 

–Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, "Obsession" (1983) 

There's nothing more terrifying than a teenage girl. 

Granted, teenage girls have been mooning over pop stars for decades, but the late German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt took that basic idea and ran with it all the fucking way. His 1982 psychological thriller has now been restored in 4K and premieres in the US at New York's Metrograph on Friday.

Simone (17-year-old Luxembourg actress Désirée Nosbusch, who looks like '80s Diane Lane from some angles and '70s Jenny Agutter from others), a high school student, is crazy about new wave musician R (Rheingold singer Bodo Staiger, whose Düsseldorf band also performed the score), a mononym like Robin Scott, who recorded as M when he released 1979's "Pop Muzik."

Right: Lothar Manteuffel, Bodo Staiger, and Brigitte Kunze 

of Rheingold

Schmidt presents Der Fan, his third film, from Simone's point of view as the mostly-silent superfan gives voice(over) to her every thought. It isn't just about loving R's chilly, synth-based music, which she listens to incessantly, but about loving the gentle, caring man who rules her fantasies, so she writes him letter after letter, undeterred by the fact that he never writes back--after all, plenty of other girls do the same--but she's certain he loves her; he just doesn't know it yet. (Rheingold's quintessentially Germanic music splices Kraftwerk with Bowie in Berlin.) 

Compared to R, everything else falls away: school, parents, even food (every time Simone sits down to eat she's interrupted). The teen crush is a universal phenomenon, except Simone doesn't even share her obsession with friends, because she doesn't have any. She's a pretty young woman with adorably crooked teeth and an enviable wardrobe from a middle class, two-parent household, but she has little going for her personality-wise. 

She even gets aggressive with the postman (Klaus Münster)--the closest thing she has to a friend--after weeks without a letter from R. She goes so far as to accuse the other postal workers of also keeping them from her. 

Because of her looks, her leather pants, and her propensity to wander around Ulm unaccompanied, men of various ages try to pick her up, and she seems distinctly uncomfortable with the attention. Eckhart suggests she isn't interested in real men at all, just the fantasy version who lives in her head. 

She confirms her lack of interest in reality when she throws her books away after daydreaming through her classes. After her dad threatens to send her to boarding school, she packs a bag and runs off to Munich, where she has more uncomfortable encounters with inferior men on her way to meet the superior R, who will surely sweep her off her feet. And he kind of does. 

Simone waits outside a television studio where she knows he'll be taping an episode of "Top Pop," and one day he magically appears, but instead of asking for an autograph, like all the other female fans, she stares and stares…and faints. When she comes to, with R looking over her, she's in the studio, where he invites her to sit in the stands while he prepares. It's 40 minutes into the picture, and she finally says more than a few words when he comes over for a friendly chat before the performance while his assistant and sometime (or wannabe) girlfriend stares daggers at the two of them. 

R follows up with a little private time in the green room where they share a kiss. More significantly, he leaves the studio after the taping with her and not the dagger-staring blonde. It's probably happened many times before, but Simone doesn't care; she's convinced she's the only one who counts. 

Instead of his hotel, R takes her to the modernist home of an associate who's away in the US. This seems risky in the pre-cellphone era, not least when one of these people is more than a little sexually inexperienced.

Once they cross the threshold, Eckhart also slips into a more arty mode in terms of the staging, lighting, and camera work. It isn't psychedelic necessarily, but everything seems off-kilter. Clothes come off and the usual things happen, but this isn't The Wall. Simone is a teenager, yes, but R isn't aggressive, though the Rheingold score has an eerie, The Hunger vibe to it. 

Simone was expecting a night of passion, except things end just as they were beginning to heat up as R suddenly announces that he needs to get back to his team to smooth things over, since he had left in a bit of a huff when they started to make demands he didn't feel like dealing with at the moment. 

So, he gets dressed and prepares to leave while Simone remains undressed. He gives her the key and swears he'll be back, but he doesn't clock how agitated she's becoming as he appears to move ever so slowly towards the door. Then, she screams. And screams again, and makes her move. Suffice to say, now he's well and truly hers, because he isn't going anywhere. Ever. 

What happens next plays out in darkness after Simone hears voices outside and turns off the light to evade detection. Tears roll down her face as she does what she does; you can make of that what you will. If you've read anything about the film, you'll have some idea what's in store, but I won't spoil the surprise, other than to say that Eckhart relies more on suggestion than special effects. Simone may be a poor student, but she's a clever girl. 

In Keir-La Janisse's essential guide to cinematic women on the edge, House of Psychotic Women, she describes Der Fan as "more art film than exploitation film," and she's spot on, even as other writers have described it as Euroshock or various shades of horror. They're not completely wrong, but it does have a certain icy elegance that takes it into a different register.

Though Bodo Staiger never acted in another feature, he's convincing as a narcissist who sees the comely admirer as willing, yet fails to really see her or hear what she's saying. It may be a problem she's struggled with her whole life: no one ever really saw or heard her, so she turned inward and stayed there. When she's with her parents, for instance, they only seem concerned that she attends school, eats her dinner, and that's about it. 

With R, Simone drops hints that she isn't just another fan, but he misses them, maybe wilfully. If he isn't as cold or as cruel as I expected, he's still an experienced adult man taking advantage of a vulnerable young woman. 

The same could be said of Eckhart Schmidt, since Désirée Nosbusch spends an entire extended sequence in the altogether. 

A known quantity in Germany at the time, she went to court to get the uncut version suppressed, but the filmmaker prevailed, leading to a falling out, though Eckhart got his, in a manner of speaking, since the film has suffered every imaginable indignity over the years, though the various adulterated versions have also helped to make it a curiosity, a collectible, and a cult classic. 

Years later, Nosbusch and Eckhart would reconcile, but I can see why it was a difficult shoot and why she had regrets, and yet I can't imagine anyone else in the role. Simone is so closed-off to everyone except the man who lives in her head that she could have been off-putting, but she's magnetic. 

After Der Fan, she continued to act for another five decades. Unlike Eckhart and Staiger, she's still with us (still exceptionally attractive, too). I hope she's made her peace with the film, because it's one in which a casually predatory man won't go on, because he can't go on, and a very hungry young lady will finally sit down at an elegant table to enjoy a hearty meal.

Der Fan was previously available on home video through Mondo Macabro, but the new Fun City Editions release marks the US theatrical debut. It's the star attraction in Metrograph's series That Most Taboo of Red Meats featuring House, In My Skin, Jennifer's Body, Raw, and Spider Baby. No Seattle dates yet, but if you're up for a road trip, Der Fan plays Portland's Hollywood Theatre on Sept 20. Images from the IMDb (Désirée Nosbusch, Nosbusch with Klaus Münster, and Simone Brahmann staring daggers), Spotify (Rheingold portrait), and Mondo Digital (Nosbusch with Bodo Staiger).  

A Journey into a Mysterious Past with Carla Simón's Semiautobiographical Romería

ROMERIA / Pilgrimage 

(Carla Simón, Spain, 2025, 111 minutes) 

With a pack on her back and a camcorder at the ready, 18-year-old Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia, who recalls Léa Seydoux) sets out in 2004 to track down her biological father's death certificate in order to apply for a scholarship to study film in Barcelona. And to solve the mystery of his relatively short life. 

Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) uses Marina's mother's diary entries, which cover a crucial four-year period, as an organizing principle, augmented by Marina's video images (32-year-old Catalan-Valencian actress Laia Manzanares reads the entries in voiceover). 

Things get off to an awkward start when Marina visits the civil registry in Vigo and finds no record of her birth (her mother also died when she was young, but earlier). A clerk tells her they can correct the record with a sworn affidavit from her grandparents, so she goes on a sailing trip with her cousin Lois (Sex and Lucia's Tristán Ulloa, below), his wife, and their sons. Their final destination: her grandparents' home. On the phone, she tells her adoptive mother these people seem rich, though she isn't after money.

On land, she connects with aunts and an uncle. Though they're welcoming, she tells her mother she finds them odd, possibly because there's something they aren't telling her, like why her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido from Mondays in the Sun) warned her adoptive parents to stay away. A younger cousin also says they were told not to touch her, most likely because her father died from AIDS, though that's not how HIV+ transmission works. 

As Marina learns more about her parents, she finds that a lot of it isn't good, but also that his family only made her father Alfonso's final years harder. 

Aside from a few revelations, she mostly meets with evasions, especially from her grandparents. She finds an ally, however, in her cousin Nuno (fellow newcomer Mitch Martin, here billed simply as Mitch), though their physical chemistry isn't exactly ideal since they're, you know, cousins, but their relationship is convivial, conspiratorial, and thoroughly Platonic. 

Then she meets a scruffy street cat, who leads her down a dark street and away from a bustling bar, at which point she steps into an entirely different realm. Considering the realism of the rest of the film, this extended sequence which takes place in the mid-1980s, isn't unwelcome, though it moves things in an entirely different direction, one filled with sex, drugs, full frontal nudity, and ghostly choreography as the diary entries Marina has been reading come to vivid, feverish life. 

Simón, in her second semiautobiographical feature, returns to the real world at the end, and La Chimera DP Hélène Louvart handles both modes with ease. Marina sets out to find a document and to solve a mystery, but she also forces her family, as much through her resemblance to her mother as to her actions, to confront their past--and gets in a little harmless revenge, too--though I didn't realize until I looked up the credits that the diary entries aren't fictionalized, but come from letters written by Simón's mother, Neus. 

Romería follows 2017's Summer 1993 in which Simón revisits the period in her childhood just after she lost her parents and as she adjusts to her new adoptive home. (I haven't yet seen 2022's Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, which explores her Catalan heritage, but I plan to watch it next.) 

Simón could have become a novelist, or even a therapist, as a way of dealing with her past, but she became a filmmaker, just as Marina plans to do. Fortunately, neither film is solipsistic or self-pitying, not least when the stigma around AIDS persists, though not to the same degree as in the 1980s, during Spain's La Movida Madrileña, which gave rise to an increase in intravenous drug use and HIV+ infection.

I was particularly impressed by the naturalistic performance of Llúcia Garcia, who Simón's crew plucked from obscurity as she was returning from summer camp. She handles two roles with grace and seems comfortable with nudity and semi-nudity, since there's a lot of both. It's hard to believe Romería represents her first professional credit. I hope it won't be her last. 

For all the time spent with biological family in the film, though, a significant subtext lies mostly behind the scenes, since Simón's adoptive brother composed the score, her adoptive sister appears in her films, and her adoptive parents read her screenplays and watch the edits. If Marina appears uncomfortable around her blood relatives, the making of Romería, in addition to Simón's previous films, honors the loving adoptive families who help to make the dreams of one-time orphans come true.

Romería plays SIFF Film Center through Sunday, Aug 23. Images from Janus Films via The New Yorker (Llúcia Garcia), the IMDb (Garcia with Tristán Ulloa), The Moveable Fest (Garcia with Mitch Martin), and Variety (Credit: Quim Vives; Garcia with Ulloa and Marina Troncoso).

Advance to Paradise with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Murder Mystery The Samurai and the Prisoner

THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER / Kokurôjô / 

黒牢城, 

(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026, Japan, 147 minutes) 

True to its title, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner is a jidaigeki, or period drama, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa's 2021 novel Kokurôjô, with a warrior and a captive, but it's also an eastern proto-western and a murder mystery with all the trimmings. 

In 16th century Japan, specifically during the Sengoku period, there will be mysteries aplenty and circumstances will make a detective out of Araki Murashige (Departures' Masahiro Motoki), lord of Settsu and enemy of brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (Shingo Bandô), who aims to overtake Arioka Castle. Though merciful, Murashige will do what it takes to protect his holdings. 

When Kuroda Kanbei (Cloud's Masaki Suda), a clever Nobunaga envoy and a member of the rival Harima clan, tries to persuade him to surrender by insisting he can't win, Murashige imprisons him, and when Abe Jūemon switches loyalties from Murashige to Nobunaga, his 11-year-old son Jinen asks to be killed, just as Kanbei had done. Murashige refuses, despite his wife's entreaties, but the boy ends up dead anyway. According to the bushidō code, it's less shameful to be killed than to be imprisoned. 

Murashige suspects foul play, and sets out to determine the culprit by interviewing suspects, many of whom mention that Koori Juemon (Bright Future's Joe Odagiri) was wielding a longbow that night, though he swears it was to protect the castle from invaders. With no other leads, Murashige takes an unorthodox step by asking Kanbei, the prisoner, to help him solve the mystery. With his help, he does, but the film isn't over as the battle for Arioka Castle continues. 

Though merciful (and possibly infertile), Murashige is hardly a pacifist, and when he feels it's time to attack Nobunaga's forces, he leads the charge, and his men successfully beat them back. In the melée, though he loses a favored warrior, and vows to keep an eye on his son. Considering Jinen's death combined with his wife's sorrow over their childlessness, I expected the boy to play a larger role, but Murashige never mentions him again. 

The battle itself, though, produces another mystery regarding the death of Nobunaga commander Ōtsu Nagamasa and the role of two clans under Murashige's leadership, so he questions the Christian Takayama Dario (Ikkei Watanabe) and the Buddhist Saika Magoroku (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), just as he questioned the suspects in Jinen's murder, but the case remains unsolved until he seeks Kanbei's counsel, and once again, the prisoner delivers. 

As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, there are more murders and further mysteries involving theft and arson, and Kanbei helps him to solve each one. Murashige offers to release him if he renounces his allegiance to Nobunaga and joins his war council. After all, that's what Murashige once did, and the prisoner has earned his respect. Kanbei agrees, but that doesn't mean he's trustworthy, not least when he says he's more interested in serving the man, whom he also respects, than the mission, which he believes is lost. Murashige also has his men to consider, since they're unlikely to accept a Harima member as a colleague. It's a conundrum with no easy answers. 

Like a Watson to his Holmes, Kanbei points him in the right direction, but Murashige comes to find, on his own, that all these mysterious deaths are connected. His mercy was seen as a vulnerability and an impediment to Settsu's survival, so an associate took matters into their own hands, but no one could see the long game Murashige was playing quite like Kanbei. 

If there's a lesson here, and I believe there are a few, it's that listening can be a leader's greatest asset. I won't say whether Kanbei proves trustworthy or not, but Murashige takes him as seriously as his closest advisors, and learns more from him than anyone else. If they don't exactly ride off into the sunset at the end, Murashige is better off for knowing--and saving--him.  

I haven't seen all of Kurosawa's feature films, but I've seen a baker's dozen, and The Samurai and the Prisoner marks his first jidaigeki. He does the genre proud on every level, particularly the cinematography from Cloud's Yasuyuki Sasaki who works wonders with light and shadow, though it isn't his first historical effort, since the Ryūsuke Hamaguchi co-written Wife of a Spy, one of his few films to center on a female character, took place during World War II. 

That said, it took me a while to ease into the richly-detailed world Kurosawa creates, because there are so many characters, and their relationships to each other are as vital as they are complicated, but the more I watched, the more it all made sense. The director's films aren't usually this densely populated, though the way this one boils down to the tension between two worthy opponents isn't especially unusual, and also powers previous films, like 1997 J-horror classic Cure, which took inspiration from the Starling vs. Lecter relationship in Jonathan Demme-by-way-of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. That captor vs. captive dynamic continues here. 

Kurasawa has always been terrific at casting, and he's really upped the ante this time around, because every actor rises to the occasion, including Yuriko Yoshitaka, the sole woman, as Murashige's wife, Chiyoho, a Siege of Nagashima survivor who doesn't understand her husband's reticence to kill even as she's haunted by the blood-soaked, Nobunaga-fueled nightmares of her childhood.  

Another notable performer, Yamato Kochi--a man with such a serious countenance that he tends to look a little loony when he smiles--who plays the crucial role of Settsu warrior Itami Ichirozaemon, may be most familiar to non-Japanese viewers, because he played "the walking man" in Genki Kawamura's Neon horror hit Exit 8, but Masahiro Motoki as Murashige makes the most significant impression as an idiosyncratic leader who doesn't owe his beliefs, in the film, to Christian or Buddhist teachings, but simply to the idea that there's nothing weak or unmanly about mercy, about knowing when to walk away, and about knowing how to make the perfect pot of tea.

 

The Samurai and the Prisoner plays SIFF Cinema Uptown through Thurs, Aug 20. Images from The Japan Times (Masaki Suda and Masahiro Motoki) and the IMDb (Motoki and Joe Odagiri and the defenders of Arioka Castle).  

Original Maverick: James Garner, 1928-2014

Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog Armchair Commentary in 2009. Garner would end up outliving this piece by five years. 

"What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don't need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn't want to be a politician."--James Garner

 

Emmy Award-winning actor James Garner (born James Bumgarner) died on July 19, 2014 at the age of 86. 

Star of screens both big and small, the tall, dark, and handsome Westerner made his biggest mark as the title character in popular programs Maverick on ABC in the 1950s and '60s and The Rockford Files on NBC in the '70s (followed by eight made-for-TV movies on CBS in the '90s).

 

Maverick slideshow with Bret (Garner) and his brother, Bart (Jack Kelly) 

Born in Denver, Oklahoma, Garner served in the Merchant Marine, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army, receiving two Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in the Korean War. Despite his all-American good looks, Garner continued to struggle with serious health problems in the ensuing decades, culminating in quintuple bypass and knee-replacement surgery.

After his service career ended, Garner moved from the stage to advertising work to guest spots and would continue to act in commercials, most famously for Polaroid. While The Rockford Files, in which he played exonerated ex-con-turned-private eye Jim Rockford, cemented Garner's star status, the Emmy Award-winning show also served as a training ground for writer David Chase, who went on to create The Sopranos, and actor Tom Selleck, who followed in Garner's primetime footsteps as Magnum P.I.

 

Trailer for The Great Escape (1963) 

During his career, Garner also earned an Oscar nomination for Murphy's Romance with Sally Field and appeared in Up Periscope, The Children's Hour with Shirley MacLaine, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, The Americanization of Emily with frequent co-star Julie Andrews, Support Your Local Sheriff!, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, which kindled a lifelong enthusiasm for racing, HBO's Barbarians at the Gate, and Victor/Victoria (below), directed by Andrews' husband, Blake Edwards.

One of Garner's last hits was Nick Cassavetes' 2004 The Notebook, in which he played Ryan Gosling's character as a senior citizen. It was a stretch, but Garner made it work. In 2009, House creator David Shore announced that he would be adapting The Rockford Files for a new generation, though it's hard to imagine anyone who could possibly fill James Garner's shoes. (The Rockford Files with David Boreanaz will premiere on NBC in Fall 2026.)

While promoting Clint Eastwood's 2000 Space Cowboys, in which he re-teamed with the Maverick guest star, he told the BBC, "When I go, I want to finish the last shot of a picture and go directly off the set, like Spencer Tracy." 

At the time of his death, James Garner was survived by Lois Clarke, his wife of 58 years, and daughters Kimberly and Gigi (Clarke died in 2021 at 98).

James Garner joins previous obituaries for Peter Falk, Sidney Poitier, and Norman Jewison. Images from The New York Times (Garner, circa The Rockford Files, DPA/Picture-Alliance via Associated Press) and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Garner and Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria).

Not Everybody Does It But Everybody Should: In I Want Your Sex, Gregg Araki Returns to Give the Office Comedy a BDSM Makeover

I WANT YOUR SEX
(Gregg Araki, 2026, USA, 90 minutes) 

Part One: Gregg and Olivia 

Sex is natural, sex is good
Not everybody does it
But everybody should
–George Michael, "I Want Your Sex" (1987)

It's been 12 years since iconoclastic director Gregg Araki's last feature film, White Bird in a Blizzard, with Shailene Woodley and Eva Green. Since 1987, he used to release a film every two to three years on average, and then he just stopped. I couldn't say whether it was due to a lack of funding, a lack of inspiration, or something else, but it's great to have him back. 

Not that Araki ever went away, he just shifted to TV. He even created his own series, Now Apocalypse, for the Starz network, but it only lasted for one season (author and actress Karley Sciortino, the co-writer, also co-wrote I Want Your Sex). Considering that the uncharacteristically downbeat White Bird, an adaptation of Laura Kasischke's 2013 novel, wasn't his best work, I suspect he may have needed time to regroup, rethink, and recharge. 

Right: Shailene Woodley and Christopher Meloni in White Bird in a Blizzard

Which brings us to I Want Your Sex with Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. It premiered in Seattle at SIFF along with Wilde's acclaimed (and improved) adaptation of Spanish writer/director Cesc Gay's The Invite, which closed out the festival and continues at the Uptown through Aug 13. Both films are sex comedies, though Wilde's relies more on talk than action, and her sex-starved character is considerably less adventurous than Penélope Cruz's sexologist. 

I was drawn to Araki's film by the director, but also by the actors, not least because I wasn't sure how a sex comedy with that pairing would work. 

Well, the good news is that it does. The weird news is that Wilde already lived out an older woman-younger man scenario in public a few years ago. 

At this point, I should mention that the average age of an Araki performer is 24; the youngest was Midnight Skin's 16-year-old Brady Corbet and the oldest was Nowhere's 31-year-old Rachel True. At 42, Wilde is the oldest by far, but lest Araki, 67, seem like a complete ageist, he hired Roscoe Lee Brown, 84, to narrate 2007's Smiley Face. It was Browne's final film.

Left: Wilde and Styles--those names!--in 2022

In Araki's film, Wilde plays Erika Tracy, the boss, and Hoffman plays Elliot, her employee. There's a 20-year difference between the two, but it isn't just about age or gender, but power: Erika has all of it, and Elliot has none. 

While working on Don't Worry Darling, her followup to 2019's Booksmart, Wilde entered into a relationship with Harry Styles, a pop singer 10 years her junior. Granted, I wouldn't describe a global superstar as powerless, but he was the actor and Wilde was the director. 

That fact combined with last-minute casting changes, leaked text messages, and a reportedly contentious set, made the film's release challenging for Wilde, even as older--sometimes much older--male directors have been getting busy with younger actresses since the dawn of motion pictures. 

You'd figure Wilde would want to put that whole ordeal behind her, and yet I Want Your Sex plays like a super-powered satire about that same sort of dynamic. It's sexy, funny, and over the top in ways that won't be to all tastes, but it might also have been--for Olivia Wilde, at least--cathartic. 

Part Two: Erika and Elliot 

Araki opens on a scene from out of a very kinky version of Sunset Blvd. There's a naked woman floating facedown in the pool, and inside her modernist home is a young man clad solely in pink nylon lingerie with hair pointing every which way and blood and lipstick smeared all over his face. 

Right: William Holden in Billy Wilder's 1950 Sunset Blvd

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he wails. This is Elliot, a recent and rather aimless UCLA graduate in media arts, and the woman is (or was) Erika Tracy, a ridiculously glamorous artist more famous for her cynical, yet savvy pronouncements about modern art than for her cynical, yet savvy pieces of modern art. 

Araki tries to have his cake and eat it, too--and mostly succeeds--because I Want Your Sex satirizes artists who get by more on their looks and their shock tactics than on their artistic talent, except Erika knows her art is bullshit and that her buyers are suckers. She just likes to be in control. 

That time appears to have come to an end, so Araki backtracks to the, um, 9½ weeks before she ended up in the pool, and after he returns to the scene of the possible crime, he'll flash forward to trace the aftermath. Instead of causing confusion, the whip-pans back and forth, preceded by oversized on-screen text, add to the humor through their exaggerated portentousness.  

Elliot meets Erika when he arrives at her studio to interview for an assistant gig. Compared to the pierced and tattooed young hopefuls gathered in the lobby, he's pretty normcore with his rock band t-shirts (Sonic Youth, Blondie), gas station attendant shirts, sneakers, jeans, and scraggly beard. 

Inexplicably, Erika hires him after asking inappropriate questions, like, "Do you have a girlfriend?" He questions her questions, but lets her know that he does indeed have a girlfriend. Minerva (UK singer Charli xcx, cast against type), a medical student, spends nights in bed studying while wearing pajamas, glasses, and a high ponytail. It's not that she isn't attractive, it's that she finds sex--with Elliot, at least--a burden, and Charli mines laughs as the world's most bored and least exciting girlfriend (and her American accent only slips once). 

Minerva is all business and no sex, while Erika is a little business and a lot of sex, starting with black, white, and red outfits made from leather, latex, and sheer fabrics that leave little to the imagination (her imperious office manager, played by Daveed Diggs, also rocks some fun fits). To understand how Elliot could be attracted to such a controlling figure, Wilde has to look hotter than hot, and she really does, thanks in part to costume designer Arianne Phillips (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), who gives Shirley Kurata's eye-popping getups in I Love Boosters a run for the money. 

Elliot lives with his less glamorous, more down-to-earth friend, Apple (The Studio's Chase Sui Wonders, virtually unrecognizable from role to role), who is like his conscience in human form. Apple doesn't understand his attraction to Erika's work, though she finds his attraction to Erika easier to understand, especially since she's virtually naked in her video and photographic art. 

Elliot also makes a friend of a kind in the narcissistic Zap (Scream's Mason Gooding), a gay studio assistant with a hyperactive sex life who’s nearly as cynical as Erika. He's a non-stop quip machine, and though not all of his zingers land--something I would say about the film as a whole--many do. 

Zap warns Elliot that Erika tends to cycle through boy toys pretty rapidly, but he's too obsessed to pay attention. "I think about you all the time," he tells her, and much like Colin in Harry Lighton's BDSM dramedy Pillion, he finds that he likes to be dominated: "With you," he explains, "I don't have to make any decisions." In Pillion, though, Colin's dom, Ray, isn't also his boss. He isn't female either, though Araki has described I Want Your Sex as queer. I suspect he means that in the widest sense of the word, i.e. "differing in some way," according to Merriam-Webster, "from what is usual or normal."

Though his film starts out as a sex comedy, once things go to shit, Araki segues from genre to genre: erotic thriller, melodrama, noir, and horror by way of a procedural-like framing device as Detectives Zem and Zola (Johnny Knoxville and The Doom Generation's Margaret Cho) interrogate Elliot. 

In the beginning, though, he's just an eager young employee trying to please a "brilliant" and demanding boss. 

Elliot doesn't have a mean bone in his body, but he's not that different from Fred MacMurray's sap in Double Indemnity. His "wildest fantasies," he exclaims, are "coming to life," so he'll put up with anything, except Erika has a make-or-break show coming up, and she relieves her stress by putting Elliot in increasingly humiliating situations involving French artist Yvette (Kaboom's Roxane Mesquida) and the awkward, insecure Apple, who deserves better.

By the end, he's lost everything, but Erika has, too, albeit in different ways. Araki is hardly a moralist, but he was only going to let her get away with her abuse for so long, especially once Elliot learns what she was really up to. Against all odds, the director manages to conjure up a happy ending out of a scenario that began with a naked woman floating facedown in the pool. 

Part Three: Gregg, Olivia, and Cooper 

For all Araki's fun with genre, I Want Your Sex is a comedy at heart, and it's my favorite of the year next to Boots Riley's Boosters in which another ridiculously glamorous woman (played by Demi Moore) dominates and exploits her younger and more vulnerable employees. I wouldn't say these men are taking powerful women to task, though; just duplicitous ones. 

I've seen Araki's 12th film twice, a good test for a comedy, because some aren't as funny without the element of surprise, but I found the funny stuff just as funny the second time around and the less-funny stuff--like Zem and Zola--just as less-funny. It's his best comedy since Smiley Face. If anything, the new film is a more substantial piece of work in terms of the concepts at play, like power dynamics and artistic intent, though Anna Faris, who grew up in Edmonds, Wash., gave a stoner-comedy performance for the ages.  

Similarly, I Want Your Sex wouldn't work as well without the right leads, and Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are absolutely up to the task, and bounce off each other with ease. Wilde doesn't just look right for the part, she's eminently convincing as a powerhouse who has it all, but lives each day knowing how quickly she could lose it--something with which Wilde has had at least a little taste--whereas Hoffman is eminently believable as an older version of the young adventurer he played in PT Anderson's semiautobiographical Licorice Pizza, once again under the sway of an older, more experienced woman, and once again: the chemistry is electric. 

We know he should run away, but we also understand why he doesn't. 

Make it an Araki Summer! I Want Your Sex opens today at Pacific Place and other AMC and Regal theaters. On Aug 11, it plays SIFF Film Center, by way of Grand Illusion Cinema. Then, on Aug 21, Araki's debut, Three Bewildered People in the Night, opens at Northwest Film Forum, followed by the new 4K restoration of his 2004 masterpiece, Mysterious Skin, on Aug 23. 

Images from The Playlist (Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman making like Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Bed and Board), BACKGRID / People (Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles in Italy), American Cinematographer (William Holden as seen by John F. Seitz), Empire (Wilde and Hoffman), Indiewire (Wilde with a wink), and RIOTUS (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville).